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Examining Bittorrent
ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.
... again ...
How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.From the article:
Well, since, according to El Reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/brit_net_The stats:
All the above are LEGAL.my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Now would be a good time to put as much legitimate traffic (e.g. Linux distro's) as possible to make the case that Bit Torrent has legitimate use.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
"There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms."
1) They wouldn't be fighting it, if a certain group wasn't abusing it.
2) What makes P2P work isn't the technology, but broadband. Something that's confined to 20% of the US population. A demographic that's primarely affluent, white males 20-30 years of age. That means that the geeks "new business model" doesn't work for 80 % of the US.
"But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time."
What's the rush?
Yup. All it takes is any.
The legal principal is this: if the {object, device, chemical, drug} has a purpose for which it is legal, then the thing should be legal.
The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule. The pressure to legalize or ban something evinces arguments about its legitimate uses, and it's these arguments that are persuasive. Saying "We'll do it anyway" is unproductive.
In this case, since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P, it's inappropriate to ban it even if that software is only a small percentage of the service's traffic.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
*HUGE* anonymous investigations!!
.torrent on one tracker. I'm not giving any legal advice here, but if you were to download one file for what you believe to be fair use, then they won't be able to come after you like they did with KaZaa users. Instead of the hundreds of shared files, your IP address is now only associated with one.
.torrent is being shared. Someone would have to look for all new torrents and connect to the tracker and start logging IP addresses for the lifetime of the .torrent, plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own?
I always listen to warnings like that! Y2K, update to SP2, don't download anything from the internet.
BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one
Could they monitor EVERY tracker and EVERY torrent on those trackers and log EVERY IP address, maybe.. But don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that
Banning something from private networks (even publicly own private networks) is different from banning something by law. The University has apparently decided it has better uses for its bandwidth than to let you be a file server.
The Internet as a whole is driven by demand, not by fiat.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Go for it. You won't be able to keep me from copying the software with the GPL in it anyway. You won't be able to stop me from using that software then. So it doesn't matter. We will just take it back. You're such a drone. Copyright robs the public. It causes stagnation, not innovation. So you know where you can stuff your damn copyright laws.
I just tried BitTorrent downloading for the first time this past week. I like watching the show "Lost" and missed an episode, so I downloaded it via BitTorrent. It only took about an hour or so, and I was able to watch. That was cool.
Then I decided to see what this baby could really do, so I tried downloading a movie, for "scientific research" of course. It took seven hours and was in spanish despite being marked english. So I tried again. The second time the movie didn't match the title. The third time was a charm. But I doubt I'll ever do it again.
First, it's stealing and I recognize that. I don't mind paying for a good movie. I suppose some do, but you'd have to have way more time the money. It costs roughly $3.00 to rent a movie at Blockbuster. NetFlix users probably average less. You get better quality with a DVD, and it's more convenient.
I will say it seems like a great resource for Porn though. Hehe.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Wrong. There are no investigations going on to bust bittorrent users. There are investigations going on to bust people doing illegal file sharing, and some of them happen to be using bittorrent.
Or, for those too lazy to click:
To quote you,Yes, it compensates them, but the thing you don't seem to want to understand is that THIS IS THE SYSTEM THE RECORDING INDUSTRY PROPOSED and agreed to. They just never thought blank CDs would go from $35 each to 30 cents each.my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Two words - avoid BitTorrent.
Why would I do that? If I use BitTorrent for legitimate uses - does that make me guilty of something? What if I download a legitimate Linux distro... or other open source? Can't get my Debian otherwise. Microsoft might like that but I don't.
Do we jail people who make kitchen knives, guns, baseball bats, axes, tanks, planes or cars? All can be used to kill people. No we don't. But we do condemn behavior.
To the behavior part. What you are really seeing is the same thing that happened with prohibition and other imposed legislation against public will. The entertainment industry is in collusion. Take your local cable company. Do you have a competitive alternative to wired cable as you might with the telephone?
If you are like many of the people the RIAA is chasing, you have had it with monopolistic and anti-competitive entertainment options. I deal with it by renting DVDs as it costs $4 and not $25 for the original. But in reality I should be able to just download it to my computer from Sony for $2. I choose to resist using BitTorrent to rip movies but I can't say I haven't considered doing otherwise.
In fact, this Internet is something the entertainment industry fears. You or I could start our own Internet television station and they don't get their cut. Sites like http://mediahopper.com/ will prevail in time. Note the absence of Canadian and US stations when compared to smaller markets.
Sooner or later the RIAA and cable monoplies are going to evolve or loose. But the cable companies realize this and that is why they are proving much of the Internet access.
35% = BitTorrent
35% = other P2P (the article tells you this)
5% = plain old FTP (just a random guess of mine)
2% = email / instant messaging
23% (the remainder) = other (newsgroups?) / plain browsing, of which a significant portion might be pr0n.
(All numbers about as accurate as the results of a Slashdot poll ;-)
Slashdottings may be fun to note, but significant amount of all internet traffic? Don't think so. The low number for mail is because there may be lots of spam, but it's not that big a part of the total amount of data. Download a movie, >1 GB. traffic, and you can watch the content in an hour and a half. A single e-mail is maybe just a couple or tens of KB's, but may keep you busy for a while. And like IM, mostly text-based.
I think this is the basic idea behind the PATRIOT Act, the Clear Skies initiative, the Healthy Forests Proposal, No Child Left Behind act, CAN-SPAM act, etc. The forces of evil are way ahead of you on this.
Very many people are effectively required to cap their upload. I'm on a cable connection where, if I don't cap my upload at 10kbps, it drops my download to staying near 6kbps when it hits 16kbps down (I stop it at ten so everything doesn't die while I use the other portions of the internet, such as the web).
And, no, it doesn't do anything to your download speed. Yeah, I usually only average 30kbps down, but I also commonly get around 150kbps down, which leaves me with better-than-realtime download of compressed video.
Bittorrent itself is safe. Sites like suprnova.org may not be.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The study shows how vulnerable BitTorrent is to failures of Suprnova mirrors and trackers. Kill a large .torrent host and you effectively kill the network. Kill a large tracker and you severely cripple it. In comparision, ed2k network is much more resilient to attacks.
.torrent file that needs to be hosted on a large server. You can send an ed2k link by e-mail, IM or post it on Slashdot. Furthermore, ed2k has excellent search capabilities - both via servers (very fast and very efficient) and via distributed Kad[emlia] system (fast and efficient). With the ability to check the filenames and comments for a certain file, you are relatively safe against fakes even when you can't use verified links. Of course, here I deliberately ignore the fact that both networks need "community portals" to inform users about released files, to provide forums for discussion, etc.
/. and elsewhere (as if other networks don't exist), I still don't hate BT. Actually, I tried it again recently and was very satisfied with the download speeds. I don't wish BitTorrent bad. But with the recent developments with police raids on torrent sites and ed2k link sites in Europe the networks will be tested and I am not sure BitTorrent is best prepared for it. Suprnova appears to be safe because of its geographic location, but it still remains a single point of possible failure. I don't think ShareReactor was as critical to the edonkey2000 network.
First, you don't need servers to distribute ed2k links. A short ASCII string effectively replaces a large
Second, the servers play only a secondary role, even if many servers would go down, that would have a small impact on the network because of source exchange. And using Kad it's even possible to operate entirely without servers.
I do not hate BitTorrent, really. Even though I am a long time eMule user and even though I am very annoyed by the apparent popularity of BitTorrent here on
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
- The Firefox team doesn't have the source for the latest version of Internet Exploder, and they seem to be doing okay.
- Linus doesn't have the source to whatever (contrary to the Scumbag Crack-smoking Oafs), and linux is doing fine.
- OpenOffice.org doesn't have the source to Microsoft Office, and OO is OK.
Now, back on-topic (wow - what a concept). Bittorrent is only one step along the way to the future of information sharing. I huge step, but we're not there yet. If the **AA has its knickers in a twist over Bittorrent, just wait a few yearsThis paper and all of the recent news articles that provide an estimate for BitTorrent protocol traffic use the same source. A single slide in a presentation by someone from Cache Logic shows BT using 1/2 of all P2P traffic at a "tier 1 ISP." Other sources cite P2P traffic at 66% of all 'net traffic. Therefore, BT is 33%.
I think any estimate made without measurements at many major routers would be suspect. While there is no doubt that BT is quite popular, the evidence presented thus far for the amount of traffic using BT protocol is extremely flimsy. I would take it with a grain of salt.
burris
There is no substantial noninfringing use of bittorrent.
whoa, wishful thinking! The fact that you have a majority of infringing traffic is irrelevant - more precisely, the wrong angle. By your argument, medical use of marijuana should not be alowed either - since the other illegal uses are by far a majority (in the US at least). significant does not pertain to signal-to-noise ratio - it has to do with the signal vs. lack of signal comparison. If by banning BitTorrent there is significant damage for legal users[*] it should be legal. The rest is about enforcing the law when illegal uses come up, which is police work, not lawmaker work.
[*] and aside from bt becoming the preferred distribution method of free ISOs (Linux, *BSD, Gutenberg and so on), if the Blizzard and WoW are any indication, game providers could move towards such distribution channels too. Since there's no comparable tech that would withstand a flashcrowd for the download launch of the next big hit game client, that makes BT a significant tech.
I have a few comments on your analysis of the BitTorrent protocol... My main criticism is that you are analyzing BitTorrent in combination with pirate web pages as a P2P file sharing system, when BitTorrent's real purpose is to be a file DISTRIBUTION system.
.torrent file) would obviously receive a genuine .torrent file, and the data in that file verifies the data received in the download. It's only torrent file redistributors like Suprnova.org where you'd need to be concerned about pollution.
.torrent file anyway, and a standard download would also be blocked.
:-)
BitTorrent is designed to replace and enhance the performance of a standard http or ftp download server. Where even ten simultaneous downloads can slow the performance of most inexpensive server setups to a crawl, BitTorrent can easily handle ten thousand or more, and in this it is an enormous success.
One necessary element of a true BitTorrent distribution is a dedicated seed server. This server ought to be always working, and should have a significant amount of bandwidth behind it; I'd recommend 30KB/s minimum, but more is better. You complain that seeders are "punished" and this is why torrents die, but while long-term seeders are nice, they aren't necessary. It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to. Having torrents die off when interest fades is an artifact of misuse of this specification.
You worry about pollution on Suprnova.org, and so do I; there's no reason why it wouldn't exist. But as BitTorrent was normally intended this isn't a problem at all. People visiting Blizzard's website to download content via BitTorrent (actually Blizzard uses a modified downloader, but the concept would be the same if users received a standard
You're also concerned about tracker availability. I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the
As a sharing method BitTorrent indeed has some deficiencies, but it simply wasn't designed for that. That BitTorrent is being misused for that purpose only testifies to its effectiveness. Perhaps a sharing system with elements taken from BitTorrent will someday arise; I know Suprnova.org is attempting to create one with "Exeem". But please don't badmouth BitTorrent.
The problem here lies not in the "Copyright Cartels" but in your Terms Of Service with your ISP. The problem is that the contract you signed with them for acess lets them disable said acess arbitrarily.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Problem is none of those things are true. We know that most media is overpriced and most actual content creators(artists, programmers, etc) are underpaid(at least comparatively, famous actors/actresses are an exception of course since they don't usually do multi-picture deals and their name has brand power).
This means that someone is getting the money and it is neither the content creator nor the public, who are the people these laws were initially designed to support.
Unlimited upload on BT (or any p2p for that matter) is bad because it uses TCP so the upload interferes with the packets sent to tell the computer you are downloading that you are actually reciving packets from it. Since those packets do not get sent, the computer you are downloading from sends slower. It would also be interfering with your HTTP requests and acknowledgements to the web server. (There is a correct terminology for what I am saying, I am just to tired to think of it.) On the other hand, I have found that capping my upload too low does lead to lower download speeds. (If there are not a ton of seeds, my download tends to hover around three times my upload.)
Centralization breaks the internet.